But was there not a feeling of the end of an era in Prague already in the spring of 1968, when Czech directors were suddenly, after 20 years, confronted with their newly gained freedom? As Jan Nemec says:

"the difference between today [1968] and yesterday is primarily that we all find ourselves in a situation that we were not ready for. The cards have been redealt, the game is open, and for a moment everyone can play what he wants. The moving force of all our activity today has been 'the struggle against the dark forces of reaction,' to borrow a phrase from Stalin's History of the Bolshevik Party. The driving force has fallen by the wayside, at least for the present. When one lives in a society that is essentially not free, it is the obligation of every thinking person to attack obstacles to freedom in every way at his disposal, which is what happened. Now, of course, everyone is faced with a choice: What does he really want? What does he feel must be done and said in the new situation, one that differs from the previous situation in that people are no longer behind barbed wire, but rather within a normal society, so that in our case, a different sort of activity will be called for?"

Maybe 1968 signaled the end of the "new wave." However, a dozen directors of international standing were already turning to something different, finding new ways of expressing their talent. The Russian invasion not only put an end to the "new wave" but, for the time being anyway, to Czech cinema as such.

It is only now that the West is becoming acquainted with the extraordinary revival of Czech literature that took place during the 1960s as these remarkable works keep coming from Western publishers, along with books, written after the Russian invasion, that are banned from publication in Czechoslovakia. Contrary to the situation in cinema, we have here much more of a sense of the continuity of this literary trend. Movie production is a "public activity" which requires substantial material means; once the political conditions had changed, the production of "undesirable" directors was stopped. Writers are much more difficult to silence. They may not be published and thus lose touch with their readers, but they can still write privately, "for the drawer" as they now say in Prague. Besides, the importance of a readership for the writer still has to be proved: Salinger has for the last 20 years deliberately secluded himself from a public he considers rather a nuisance to his creativity.

Writers also seem to have an inclination to assume a sense of mission (to preserve the national culture against totalitarian rule). Thomas Mann in his California villa remained the embodiment of German culture, resisting the barbarism of Goebbels and Co. Solzhenitsyn, though not published in Russia in the last ten years before he was expelled, still had a sense of speaking for the people, representing the national values against the neo-Stalinist pragmatism of Brezhnev. Similarly Czech writers, particularly Kundera. Vaculik and Kohout sensed the necessity to remain in their country. In touch with their people, even in this period of darkness. This is also reinforced by the shared feeling that they have a debt to pay. In 1948 Kohout and Kundera warmly welcomed the communist takeover in Czechoslovakia. They soon found the Stalinist frame too narrow for their creative work and though materially privileged, launched a decisive attack on the ruling party elite. Frustrated from the results of a "revolution from above" in 1948, they helped to bring about another one "from below" in 1968.

Their works come to us at a time when no new literature worth reading is being published in Czechoslovakia. The "official" literature oscillates between two genres: trashy novels and political pamphlet. Mr. Muller can again serve us as the example of the first type, with his cheap would-be sexy novel. "With Elvira at the Spa."

The other sort is best represented by Alexej Pludek's antisemitic "novel" Vabank, the first to deal in literature with the events of 1968. As in any socialist-realist work the characters must be archetypes. The "positive hero" is a working class Czech guy, who just returned from Syria where he was providing "brotherly help" on an engineering project. The "bad guy" is a son of the exploiting class, "pretentious, selfish and foreign to our country." The fact that he operates as "eminence grise" of various literary and political circles is not "an indication of exceptional gifts, but rather a symptom of an egoistic character, in his case almost innate." Why almost? Isn't it obvious since we learn later that his grandfather's real name was Bergmann! (The latter arrived poor from Galicia and within five years owned already all the pubs and breweries in town!) In a style reminiscent of the Nazi era or more recently of General Brown. Pludek presents the Czechoslovak reform movement of 1968 as only a part of a large. Zionist plot, which started with the 1967 six-day war in the Middle East and was to end with "the seizure of the government of the major world powers."

While this kind of fascist garbage received the National Book Award in Prague, a dozen works by Czech writers not allowed to be published in their country were acclaimed by critics in the West. Whereas the "official" publications seem a rather desperate effort' third-rate writers to please their Russian-sponsored supervisors, those that are banned are linked with and perpetuate the Czech literary tradition.

This tradition is best represented by the work of two authors writing at Prague at the end of World War I: Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hasek (The Good Soldier Schweik). The tradition could be called the literature of the absurd: with Kafka it is expressed through the feeling of alienation, with Hasek through a satiric sense of humor. Joseph Skvorecky continues the latter tradition with his novel The Tank Brigade, where the contemporary Schweik is confronted with the stupidity and absurdity of the Czech army at the height of the Stalinist era, instead of the Austrian Army of Franz Joseph.

Ludvik Vaculik's novel The Guinea Pigs (NY: Third Press) is a most brilliant venture in the Kafka-esque vein. Like Joseph K. in The Trail, Vaculik's hero is a bank employee. He lives a petty monotonous life with his wife Eva, "two tolerable little boys" and a couple of newly acquired guinea pigs that soon become the center of the family life. Our clerk works in a weird bank; enigmatic employees of the bank walkd out everyday with some of the bank notes in their pockets. Sometimes the money is confiscated by the guards at the exit, but the whole thing seems absurd since the guards don't return it all to the bank. What an economist would diagnose simply as a supplementary cause of inflation under socialism, deeply puzzles our clerk, who hopelessly tries to understand the whereabouts of this clandestine circulation of currency. The more he tries, the less he knows and the more confused he becomes, as his investigations lead him to the mysterious and dangerous basements and sewers of the Prague underground. Even a state bank in a socialist state did not remove from Prague the obscure forces that haunted Joseph K....

Another prolific, now-silenced Czech writer is Milan Kundera. While he became famous in the West with his political novel The Joke, his work became a classic in Prague where anybody would know the famous quotation from it when Ludvik, replying to his enthusiastically communist girlfriend who wrote to him about the "health atmosphere" prevailing at the summer Party school, quips on a postcard:

"Optimism is the opium of the people! The healthy atmosphere stinks! Long live Trotsky! Ludvik"

The Joke is the story of an individual's life destroyed by the absurdity of a sociopolitical system (and of an era) that was deadly serious. Kundera's new novel Life is Elsewhere (NY: A. Knopf) explores the individual's motivations for joining that system and playing a part in its arbitrary destructive powers.

In Life is Elsewhere the hero (Jaromil) is an overprotected, mother's only beloved boy who discovers and embraces at the same time, live, revolution, poetic strength, political intolerance and impotence. Youth, poetry, revolution and sexual immaturity fit together for Kundera.

Jaromil is a frustrated and extremely jealous lover. With the triumph of the "revolution," (the communist takeover in 1948), he joins the Party, and exchanges private beauty, which he alone understood, for public "beauty," which can be understood by everybody. With a Party card in his pocket, he discovers a way to satisfy his jealous anxieties. His girlfriend, late for a rendez-vous with him, does not find anything better to appease him than to invent a story about her brother leaving the country for the West. Jaromil (who by this time has achieved prominence by giving poetry readings to police agents) goes immediately to denounce her to the National Security. In the evening once she is already in jail, it occurred to him that at that very moment his girl was no doubt surrounded by men--policemen, interrogators, guards. They could do with her whatever they wanted. Watch her change into prison clothes, peer through her cell window while she was sitting on a pail, urinating....One thing puzzled him: these images did not arouse a single spark of jealousy!